Shirley Herz, Press Agent for Broadway and Beyond, Dies at 87

Shirley Herz, a theatrical press agent whose career stretched from the days of planting blurbs in Walter Winchell’s newspaper column to the television and Internet eras, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 87.

Her death was confirmed by Kevin P. McAnarney, a publicist. Ms. Herz, who received a Tony Honors for Excellence award for her work in 2009, had suffered a stroke last month, according to the Web site of the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers.

Ms. Herz publicized shows for almost 65 years, among them Broadway fare like “La Cage aux Folles” and the Off Broadway work of groups like the Abingdon Theater Company and the Irish Repertory Theater.

Her client list also included dance troupes, films, television shows and even the Moscow Circus. Angela Lansbury, Rosalind Russell and Josephine Baker were among the stars she worked with.

Ms. Herz was born on Dec. 30, 1925, in Philadelphia. She said she fell in love with the theater as a child when she saw Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story.” But it was another actress, Barbara O’Neil, who got her into the publicity business. Ms. Herz was selling watches at the Georg Jensen store in New York when Ms. O’Neil walked in.

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Shirley Herz received a Tony Honors for Excellence award in 2009.CreditDavid Goldman/Associated Press

“I’d met her in Philadelphia as an autograph hound,” Ms. Herz recalled in a 2000 interview for the press agents association. “She saw me and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ I told her I was looking for a job in the theater. When I got home to Philadelphia the next day, there was a phone call from her, saying call so-and-so and they’ll help you get a job. And that’s how I got my first press job.”

Ms. Herz had a certain fearlessness when it came to trying to help her shows. At a roast in Ms. Herz’s honor in 1995, June Havoc recalled driving around with Ms. Herz surreptitiously plastering posters for Ms. Havoc’s show “Marathon 33” on telephone booths and bus stops in 1963.

“I had lived through vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood, but until that night, vandalism had not entered my life,” Ms. Havoc said.

Ms. Herz, who in the late 1990s was accompanied to her Times Square office by a rat terrier named Chloe, was accepting of the changes she had seen in the neighborhood over the years. “If you live in the past, you might as well go to Frank Campbell’s funeral home and say, ‘Bury me,’ ” she said in 1997.

Ms. Herz, who had dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to pursue work in the theater, founded her own agency, Shirley Herz Associates, in 1971. She became a mentor to younger publicists, some of whom went on to found their own firms.

Barry Brown, a producer who worked with Ms. Herz on many shows, including “La Cage,” said she was “an absolute lover of theater,” adding, “She not only loved going, but loved nurturing it any way she could.” Ms. Herz is survived by her husband, Herbert Boley, whom she married in 1948.

Mr. Brown recalled that Ms. Herz was always very secretive about one thing: her age.

“The worst part of all this,” he said of her passing, “is she would be furious because finally everybody knows how old she is.”

Correction:Aug. 14, 2013

An obituary on Tuesday about the theatrical publicist Shirley Herz misstated the name of an award she received in 2009. It is the Tony Honors for Excellence, not a special Tony Award. The error was repeated in an accompanying picture caption.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Shirley Herz, 87, Press Agent For Broadway and Beyond. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe